In all coding guidelines i’ve read, people suggested to be verbose in naming so that the code is understandable without knowing the entire source.

* hasSomething
* doSomething
* isSomething

In the case described we “load” a “controller”. So if i would read a source that has the following in it, i would expect to happen or fail.

if (loadController($userinput)) {
    // success
} else {
   // notice user
}

Now let’s assume $userinput is not set, empty – it’s null. In that case the current loadController would return true, even though the userinput is not available and nothing happens as expected. The user did something wrong. He did not enter a controller name, but the function keeps returning “true”. That’s bad…

I don’t know a way how to make this clearer.

If i read API Docs and i see a bool-function with a descriptive name like “createFile” and just a single argument i expect it to fail if the value is left empty.

When i write functions like that i begin with an if-sentence before i do anything else and i encourage everyone to do so too.

if($name) 
   require app_controller, 
   require $name 
(else) 
   error, return false

Even “null” is there for a reason. :-)

JM2C

Well, the semantics of the function signature loadController($name) is that it loads the controller with the specified name. If you now pass null as parameter, you violate this semantic as null is not a valid controller name and hence the function should throw an error (and not load the AppController).

I hope it is now more clear :)

I’m veeeeery curious. As the irc log is unavalaible right now, do you or nate have the irc logs about this topic? (semantics of this function).

@nate: For me the issue is not the incomplete doc block but the semantic of the function. But as discussed in IRC we disagree in this point.

@Tarique: I fully agree with you.

Comments like //Increment $counter by 1 are very obvious and thus the comment is redundant but “why” the $counter is being incremented may not be obvious and needs to be commented

That’s definitely one area where we could use some help.